Cooper Improves Leapfrog Grade

The Leapfrog Group has released its semi-annual Hospital Safety Grades list. We are pleased to report that Cooper has improved its grade from a “C” to a “B.” We should be proud of this accomplishment, but remember we still have many concerns with the continually changing Leapfrog grading methodology.

As noted in the past, Leapfrog methodology fails to account properly for the socioeconomic and acuity differences between the patients treated by academic tertiary care health systems and those treated by community hospitals. For this reason Cooper, and other academic health systems, generally receive lower grades than neighboring community hospitals.

We should celebrate our success in improving the Leapfrog grade and work to achieve the same results on all publicly reported surveys. To do so, we must concentrate our efforts on providing a consistently safe, superior health care experience to our patients and their families – the same experience we would want for our own families.

Congratulations on this success. We look forward to many more accomplishments in the future. Thank you for your commitment to making Cooper the best place to be a patient, the best place to be an employee, and the best place to practice medicine.